Candidates Going the Bus Route

The Victory Express barrels through weekend-empty city streets, blocks away from its destination. A thousand miles of asphalt have come and gone, five days, 13 towns and a baker’s dozen speeches blurred together in the thin autumn sunshine: Flat tax, strong military, a return to decency.

All of a sudden you can hear the crowd, “We believe in Steve! We believe in Steve!” Driver Johnny L. Williams sounds the air horn, flips on a Sousa march and glides the big bus to a stop. The door swings open and there stands the candidate, all crooked smiles and blue-suited thank yous, perched on the steps of his mobile stage.

“It’s the end of the bus trip and you can see the enthusiasm,” says Republican Steve Forbes, multimillionaire publisher and one of the rollingest candidates on the path to the presidential primaries. “God bless you and thank you very much!”

Thank you for coming out in Council Bluffs, Sioux City, Fort Dodge and Waterloo. For waving from the porches of neat farmhouses in harvest-emptied cornfields. For knocking on the bus door at a highway rest stop to request a picture with candidate and coach. For responding to the rolling billboard sporting letters as tall as a child in kindergarten: “STEVE FORBES 2000. He Wants America To Win.”

With an instrument as blunt as a 20-or-so-ton bus, it’s easy to get your point across. Forbes knows it and so does Al Gore. Gary Bauer knows it, as do Bill Bradley, George W. Bush, Orrin G. Hatch and John McCain. If you want to meet voters, hit the front pages and the evening news and look like a back-slapping regular guy while you’re at it, travel by motor coach.

Although buses have been a campaign staple for the last 30 years or more, they mostly did background duty as workhorses hauling staff and reporters. In the late 1980s, Dan Quayle and George Bush ventured out via autobus, but it wasn’t until the 1992 election, when Bill Clinton and running-mate Gore hit the back roads, that the campaign bus trip got its current cachet as the whistle-stop tour of the ‘90s.

“It seemed to be a revival of an older style coming back,” says Keith Melder, former political history curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. “I’m tickled to see this happen. It tells me these styles don’t disappear, that they have an ongoing life. They can be resurrected and carry on.”

For good reason. It’s hard to find an ambivalent spectator anywhere along a campaign bus route because the guy rolling down the open highway might someday be president of the United States, and, well, here he is. Candidates are practically guaranteed a reaction like this one: “Oh, it’s phenomenal,” says Thaylia Oberstar, a retired backup postmaster in Pickens County, S.C., describing the Bush campaign bus rumbling into view.

“You’re waiting and you have all these expectations. Absolutely ecstatic and such a thrill,” she bubbles. “And to know that a candidate for president cared enough about the little people of Pickens, that’s a phenomenal thing.”

Oh, he cares all right. They all care in Campaign 2000. Would-be presidents are using buses as never before, and in the last six weeks alone, five candidates have made a combined eight separate bus trips through America’s early primary states--journeys where the bus was both transportation and communication, campaign vehicle in more ways than one.

To date, Forbes has logged some 10,000 miles during four buscapades in three states; Bradley announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in his boyhood home of Crystal City, Mo., in September then hopped a bus north to the cornfields himself. Every serious candidate in both major parties has traveled by bus sometime since summer save one--Republican Alan Keyes, who rents a 32-foot Winnebago in Des Moines from Ed Garner’s Autorama.

Bush Caravan Makes Restaurant Stop

8:15 a.m., Easley, S.C. The Bush caravan lumbers up to Jimmy’s Family Restaurant (“Welcome George W. Bush, Steak Biscui 99 cents”). The air inside is thick with cigarette smoke and the perfume of pancakes. The place goes wild as the candidate starts his slow creep along the Leatherette booths, held back by a penumbra of security agents, reporters, television boom mikes and fans.

He kisses the soft, wrinkled cheeks of white-haired Southern ladies and the milk-scented foreheads of swaddled infants. He poses with big-smiled adolescents flashing orthodontia (Anthony Martin, 11: “He told me this was a good reason to miss school!”) and autographs anything thrust his way, a coffee mug, a checkbook register. “Ma’am, ma’am,” Evan Landreth tells a reporter, “put on the front page, ‘Bush Signs 12-Year-Old’s Shirt.’ ”

Bush walks out an hour later, cloaked in the goodwill of a couple hundred voters who love him for being him, whatever that means. Part of the appeal is simply that he’s here; there is no plane that can get a man to Easley.

“I think he’s fabulous,” says Ruth Thurlow, Lancome business manager at the local department store. “He seems like a real person.” One more snapshot--candidate and Jimmy’s staff with bus as backdrop--and it’s off to Pickens.

9:45 a.m., Pickens County Courthouse. The high school band plays “Anchors Aweigh” and the candidate extols the nobility of the men who died to keep us free. “America this week dedicates itself to the duty of memory. . . . There are stories of hopeless odds, terrible injuries. . . . We carve our thanks into stone. We stamp it into medals.”

And finally, a few days shy of Veterans Day, a scrap of news with a Currier and Ives backdrop: “The veterans’ health care system and the claims process needs an overhauling from top to bottom.”

Then it’s off to Seneca, population 8,500, and the site of a whistle-stop by George Herbert Walker Bush a couple of election cycles back. They remember it fondly here. But the big difference between dad and son, says one stealth McCain supporter as she waits to meet the governor of Texas, is that “when his dad ran, his train stopped. He didn’t get off.” But the son is “making a personal stop. That appeals to people.”

At Clemson University, it’s an afternoon jog with the cross-country team. In Anderson, it’s sweet tea and shredded pork served up by the Brushy Creek Bar-B-Q House in nearby Powdersville. Night has fallen, the Bush bus has disappeared into the inky sky and this could be anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, with 500 people gathered to hear a man on whom they will soon pass judgment. “This is a huge crowd and I’m humbled,” Bush declares. “I am grateful that so many of you gave your time to be here. I’m going to give a few remarks and then I’m going to work and shake every hand here.”

And he does.

Transit Modes Vary for Whistle-Stop Tours

A hundred and three years ago, William Jennings Bryan broke the good-taste barrier. What did he do that was so crass back in 1896? He campaigned for president. For himself. In America’s first presidential whistle-stop tour, he covered 18,000 miles by train, delivered more than 600 speeches, sometimes up to 30 a day. As many as 5 million people heard him speak--in person.

The folksy Harry S. Truman made the whistle-stop his personal signature in 1948. The train was still integral to presidential politics in 1952, when candidates Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson went at it on the rails. By 1960, when John F. Kennedy campaigned for president in his family’s plane--dubbed Caroline after his daughter--air travel had pretty much taken over.

Sure, presidential candidates still use trains, but mostly for nostalgia-driven photo-ops designed for TV, trips that are pretty but inconvenient. “Train tracks now run through all the crappy parts of town, so you have to bring the people to the trains,” says Stuart Spencer, a longtime Republican campaign consultant.

Buses--fast, accessible and relatively comfortable--are another thing entirely, threading candidates directly into the fabric of Middle America. With asphalt for infrastructure and schedules set by the stamina of the office seeker, they can deposit him smack on a voter’s driveway. But along with flexibility comes the unpredictable, as McCain found out in a recent New Hampshire swing.

Near the end of a 12-hour-plus campaign day, McCain’s Straight Talk Express lands at a Nashua bookstore. Veterans and senior citizens, some 400 strong, snake around bookshelves and armchairs to meet him.

Finally, McCain gets back on the bus. And finds a surprise: An older woman in Birkenstocks and granny glasses. “I just had to meet you,” she gushes, as the candidate’s aides flash uncomfortable glances and a gentle McCain shakes her hand. Want to join the bus tour, he asks. She demurs.

It’s late October on Al Gore’s “Iowa town tour,” and this time the bus trip turns unusually intimate in this age of packaged sound bites. Instead of stopping to greet supporters--often vast crowds gathering in the dead of night--the vice president actually brings his supporters on board, company for him along the lonely back roads.

Sure, campaign volunteers drive the supporters back to their cars when the trip is over, but the old adage that nobody rides free holds true even in Iowa. Gore’s campaign typically asks the riders to organize a meal and invite 10 or so diners each as a test of the riders’ organizational abilities--”dry runs for the caucuses,” Chris Lehane, Gore’s campaign press secretary, calls such events. And the bus rides? They’re “an energizing tool and a way to thank people,” he adds.

A campaign swing by bus “gives people a sense that you have a common touch,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “You’re in a mode of transportation used by common people, not presidents. A train or bus is a form of communication itself. [Candidates] plaster them with messages. You don’t need to see Steve Forbes to know that Steve Forbes is in your town.”

A Snapshot of Forbes’ Wife With Forbes’ Bus

Which he is right now. Standing in front of the Failor family fireplace in Muscatine, Iowa, shined black loafers sinking into bright tan carpet with that just-vacuumed look and sharing his vision for a “New Birth of Freedom,” also the name of his brand-new book.

“Liberty should include the freedom to choose your own doctor. . . . Liberty should offer the freedom for younger people to choose where their Social Security will be invested.”

A yellow envelope peeks out of Jeanie Bass’ tan vinyl purse, a card for the candidate and his big family, complete with a handwritten note on back, one final thought that wouldn’t fit inside: “Even my dad likes what you are saying . . . .”

The crowd bleeds out of the ample brick house. Forbes poses on the porch with the Failors. Forbes’ wife, Sabina, heads to the caravan. Wait, wait, supporters plead, beseeching the shy woman to turn, pose, smile. Bass, resplendent in Forbes shirt, Forbes hat, Forbes buttons, whips out a disposable camera. One more keepsake: A snapshot of Forbes’ wife with Forbes’ bus.

Now, Forbes’ bus is not just any bus, as owner Johnny L. Williams will quickly tell you, if he’s given half a chance. Forbes can watch television news via satellite and send faxes. His Web photographer can download digital pictures destined in minutes for the Internet. His staff can shoot, print and dispense digital pictures of supporters posing with the candidate.

“We provide a campaign in a kit,” brags Williams, who has driven for Dan Quayle and Bush the father, Patrick J. Buchanan when he was still a Republican, George W. Bush, Gary Bauer and New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. “We’re so advanced now we can go into a crowded restaurant and set up a sound system before Forbes is through shakin’ hands.”

He is through shakin’ hands now, having just wrapped up the penultimate stump speech of this final day on the road--for this trip, anyway--hitting all the grace notes over a lunch of chili and hot cider at the American Legion Hall in rural Marshalltown. At this stop he’s campaigning for two: himself and state Sen. Larry McKibben, who is running for reelection.

Ceiling fans spin lazily. Old men doze over comfortable paunches. Gentle applause erupts at all the right spots. There is a growing gap between what happens in Washington and the rest of the country, and Freedom works and One reason I wanted Larry to go to Washington was the crazy things they do to Social Security.

Joynell and Larry Ramon wander out into the Saturday sunshine clutching just-autographed volumes of “New Birth of Freedom.” Joynell gets halfway up the sidewalk and stops, transfixed.

“Oh, I wish I had my camera to take a picture of the buses,” she says. “It’s so exciting. It makes me realize what America is all about.”

Times researcher Massie Ritsch and staff writers Ronald Brownstein, Edwin Chen and Anne-Marie O’Connor contributed to this story.

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On the Road

Campaign buses, such as Steve Forbes’ Victory Express I, have become a mainstay in today’s political campaigns. For Forbes, a leased 1980 coach with 240,000 miles on it is a war room on wheels.

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Width: 8 1/2 feet

Weight: 33,000 pounds

Seats: 18

Maximum speed: 78 mph

Fuel capacity: 140 gallons

Miles per gallon: 5

Daily rental: $2,500

Amenities: Galley with microwave, pull-out beds, bathroom with shower, rollout stage

Technology: 7 cellular phones, fax machine, satellite TV and telephone, digital video camera, public address system, plug-in box for TV/radio microphones

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Candidates often christen their coaches. A sampling of names given to buses:

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Asphalt 1 (George Bush in ’88 campaign, Bob Dole in ‘96, George W. Bush in ‘00)

Straight-Talk Express (John McCain in ‘00)

Victory Express (Dan Quayle in ‘96)

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Sources: Custom Coach, Johnny L. Williams; researched by MASSIE RITSCH / Los Angeles Times

Busy Bus

Frequent stops are the rule for bus tours, as shown by a three-day campaign swing this month by Gary Bauer.